


Interpretations

by spoke



Category: Austin & Murry-O'Keefe Families - Madeleine L'Engle
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-02
Updated: 2014-09-02
Packaged: 2018-02-15 20:13:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2241939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spoke/pseuds/spoke





	Interpretations

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SailorSol](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SailorSol/gifts).



She’d always known they were there, you know. Tiny fragile lights drinking her in, so many of them in all those silly shapes that matter forms as it grows. That was part of what made it hard to fight off The Black Thing, when it came to the point that she had only one way left. Knowing that the essence of them would go on even as her own would didn’t really help, could not change the fact that everything they were now would be destroyed. But they had all fought so hard for so long, and how could she do less? 

She had thought she understood how they fought, too, until the first time she had to materialize. It seemed so straightforward from the outside, but once she started mimicking their shapes she couldn’t remember how she had thought it worked. 

It was so strange to stay in one shape, so difficult to get all the little molecules and such to stay in the form you’d chosen. She vaguely remembers wondering why anything would choose to stay in the one tiny form, however brief its life, but it didn’t seem to actually be like that at all! They were never just one thing, even the ones that thought they were, and making one being’s matter pretend to be a multitude of tiny things that held each other together was extremely taxing, whereas all the mortal lives held each other together. 

It came as quite a surprise to be told she was good at it, and might in time become one of their best. It was an even greater surprise, and a terrible honor, to be told that she was being assigned to a very important task because of it. But it was rather a special planet, after all, which was why It was trying so hard to take it. Because they’d remained so isolated by the fight, however, it was considered quite essential that those assigned be able to pass as humans. (For the most part.)

It was even more essential that someone be able to speak fairly fluently in their language. At first she was a tad worried she’d still failed at it, when little Charles saw right away that she wasn’t a bit like his people. The accidental sojourn in the Murrays’ kitchen, on the other hand, was deeply reassuring and, she felt, a rousing success. 

* * *

It took rather some coaching before she could even stay on one plane and in once place, because she didn’t much like it. Limiting corporeal forms never did make much sense, and the clumsy way these peoples’ minds cobbled together and separated things as if everything weren’t all of a piece was terrible. Her people had never been this corporeal to begin with. 

Which upon reflection probably didn’t help. 

It became rather easier once she found how much of their world was just that way, a jumble of separate things needing to be put together. ‘This’ was always a different thing from ‘that’ even when it very clearly wasn’t. Even when it was food, and one of the first thoughts she grasped said so: ‘You are what you eat.’ 

The fact that they had this bit of perfectly obvious knowledge and yet behaved as if they’d never figured it out was excruciating, but the most important step in learning how to communicate with them. 

Everything you take in does become a part of you, even as it remains a part of the universe, but they couldn’t see that, the poor things. They began from a place apart and had to work to put things together, which only made it harder for themselves and everyone attempting to help them - but the understanding of it helped her, as all she had to do was reverse her usual approach and things came out more or less better. It was much easier to simply pick things up in the separate pieces they were already using. 

There was still the smaller matter of terribly confusing her teachers the first time she tried speaking, but that sorted itself out eventually as she learned to skim just the very top of their world’s consciousness. She got rather a lot of strange looks, but she could more or less convey an idea, and it wasn’t her job to explain things clearly anyway. Though at some point she would like to learn what this quoting was she kept getting accused of; she was fairly certain it was rude.

* * *

There were things that time did not make easier, and the first among them was turning back the clock, so to speak. The older one became, the more invested in one’s own form and nature, and expressing oneself properly on a corporeal plane had lately become frustratingly exhausting. When she was younger it hadn’t been easy, but it had been ...easier, and her words didn’t sound so strange to hear, stretching away from her as light might fade going down a tunnel. It was far easier, not to mention more entertaining, to work on planets and planes of being that had fewer dimensions, or no corporeal existence to speak of. 

Still, one went where one was needed, and the need this time was terrible. So much of what was possible in their future depended on keeping this particular family intact.

What they were in danger of losing she could not even tell the children; even were she so inclined, it would be too much to expect them to bear. Possibly too much to understand, except for Charles; their world had been held back in its development for so long. It was difficult to tell how much any of them could grasp. They are so young, so new to the world, and her own greatest fault has always been a certain amount of impatience. Too often she forgets that there are things one never understands during a mortal life, that some learning must wait until one has gone past that stage.

She forgets still that when she sees something is not necessarily when others will see it, and that she has to let them reach their own understanding in their own time.


End file.
